Spain's Christmas lottery brings joy to an unemployed woman

An unemployed Peruvian woman was among the winners of Spain's huge Christmas lottery known as “El Gordo", receiving a prize of 400,000-euro ($425,000).

The winning ticket number was announced in Madrid’s Teatro Real opera theatre, where the woman, who was identified only by her first name, Perla, was immediately surrounded by reporters during the nationally televised event.

The woman said she lost her job at a café two years ago and had bought lottery tickets "everywhere I have visited this year."

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She revealed she purchased the 20-euro ticket with the number 05490 that led to Thursday's win in Spain's northern Asturias region.

The woman said she planned to use her lottery proceeds, which amount to some 325,000 euros after taxes, to buy an apartment in Madrid, where her children attend primary school and to make a donation to an unspecified church.

The incredibly popular El Gordo dishes out a total of 2.5 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in prize money, much of it in hundreds of smaller amounts.

Purchasing and sharing tickets, known in Spanish as “décimos” (tenths) in the run-up to Christmas is a tradition among families, friends and co-workers, and in bars and sports and social clubs.